Saturday evening in August

"The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." — Lamentations 3:22-23

Saturday evening and the light is going and I am sitting on the back porch and the evening is the kind of evening Earl would have liked.

Warm. Still. The kind of evening where the air does not move and the cicadas are louder than the birds and the garden is a dark shape at the edge of the yard and the Blue Ridge is a darker shape behind it. Earl liked these evenings. He would sit out here after supper with his boots off and his feet on the rail and he would not say anything and I would not say anything and the evening would be the third person in the conversation, the one who did not need to talk.

Seven years. I have said this number before and it has not gotten easier to say and it has not gotten harder. It has become a fact, the way the house is a fact and the garden is a fact and the empty chair on the front porch is a fact. Seven years is not a long time and it is not a short time. It is the time I have lived without him and it is also the time I have lived with his absence, which is a different kind of living-with than the kind I had before.

August endings are harder than I expect them to be. I do not know why. It is not the anniversary. That was July, and it was heavy, and I carried it and set it down the way I set it down every year. August is different. August is the sound of summer leaving and it reminds me that everything leaves. Everything has its time and its going and the going is part of the having. Earl had his time. I had mine with him. It ended on a Tuesday afternoon in July seven years ago and every August since then the summer has ended and I have felt the ending twice.

The porch is quiet. Biscuit is on the rug inside. Junebug is in the kitchen window, watching whatever Junebug watches, which is everything and nothing. The evening is cooling the way August evenings cool, slowly and without apology.

I miss him tonight. I miss him most evenings but tonight the missing has a particular shape, the shape of a summer that is almost over. The mercies are new every morning. I know this. I believe this. The evenings are harder. The evenings are when the mercy has to hold the missing and the missing has to make room for the mercy and both of them are true at the same time.

Lord, the evening is here and the summer is going. Hold what I cannot hold.